The Community Shield will come up for grabs again on Sunday, in a match pitting Premier League champions Arsenal against FA Cup winners Manchester City. And while those sides haven’t often played each other for the huge, eight-sided old trophy, a contest of this kind is nothing new.
The match is the traditional curtain-raiser to the new football season, and it invariably features sides from London and the North West. It’s three decades, in fact, since a North East club had a chance of winning what was then known as the Charity Shield. That club was Newcastle United, and as well as being the last side to play in the match, they were also the first.
The Magpies made their Charity Shield debut in 1909, only days after becoming Football League champions with four games to spare. It was their third title in four years, and they had been runners-up in three of the last five FA Cup Finals, as well. They had begun the season in impressive fashion, with five straight wins, and they had gone on to record four-goal victories over the likes of Nottingham Forest and Sheffield United. A nine-goal home defeat to Sunderland proved to be nothing more than an embarrassing blip, and they chalked up 13 victories in their next 15 games.
Cobblers
Newcastle’s opponents in the 1909 Charity Shield match would be Northampton Town. The Cobblers, as they are still known, were the newly-crowned champions of the Southern League, which was once much closer to the Football League in quality than it is to the Premier League today. The match would be played at Stamford Bridge, the home of Chelsea, on 28 April 1909, a mere two days after Newcastle played a league match at Aston Villa.
Most of the Magpies who took the field that day were established internationals. They included Bill McCracken, a full-back who had captained Ireland, and who was infamous for catching opposing players offside. Half-back Peter McWilliam, meanwhile, was known as ‘Peter the Great’. And forward George Wilson, a Scot like McWilliam, had been signed for the record fee of £1,700.
The match kicked off that Wednesday afternoon at the curious time of 5pm, and admission cost as little as sixpence, the equivalent of £3 today. (The cheapest seats for Sunday’s match, by contrast, are priced at ten times that amount.) The official programme, meanwhile, was a penny – a good investment, given that a surviving copy sold at auction in 2020 for £3,650.
A cultured man
Despite the modest prices, the attendance for the match was only 7,000, which was considered a great disappointment. Chelsea’s own crowds had averaged 30,000 – only just short of Newcastle’s, the highest in the league – and the previous year’s Charity Shield match, which had also been played at Stamford Bridge, had attracted more than 50,000. Perhaps the public had had enough football for one season, the newspapers said. Maybe the game hadn’t been well publicised. Or maybe a contest between two provincial teams was of little interest to Londoners.
Those who did make the journey to west London were greeted by clear skies and a bright sun. The turf was hard, however, and there was a strong wind blowing into the faces of the Newcastle players. They kicked off wearing their usual kit of black-and-white striped shirts, dark blue shorts, and black socks, and Northampton, in their white shirts, immediately came under pressure. The Cobblers defended well at first, but when their forwards ventured up-field, they were invariably caught offside by the Newcastle backs – McCracken and his Cape Town-born partner Tony Whitson – to the great annoyance of much of the crowd. On the half-hour, an error by one of the Northampton backs let in Magpies’ forward Jack Allan, and he opened the scoring with a neat left foot shot. Aged only 22, Wallsend-born Allan was the youngest member of the team, and the medal from this match would be the only one he won in a career cut short by the Great War and by serious illness.
Although the game was played at a fast pace, it was far from skilful, and the action was largely confined to the middle of the pitch. The Cobblers re-doubled their efforts in the second half, but the Newcastle half-backs acquitted themselves well. McWilliam was partnered Byker-born David Willis, and by Colin Veitch, the team captain. A former pupil of Rutherford College, Veitch was himself an England international, and – a cultured man besides – he would go on to write plays and help found the People’s Theatre.
Good causes
Try as Northampton might, they never looked like winning the match, and with 20 minutes left, Jock Rutherford stumbled through the Cobblers’ defence to double Newcastle’s lead. Born in Percy Main, Rutherford was another of the club’s England internationals. He had become the club’s youngest ever scorer at the age of only 17, and he was known to all and sundry as the ‘Newcastle Flyer’.
The game ended in a 2-0 victory for the Magpies, and captain Veitch stepped up to receive the Charity Shield from a Football Association official. It was announced afterwards that £227 had been raised for charity (the equivalent of around £24,000 today). Each club was given £45 to distribute to local causes, and a dozen London hospitals each received sums of £5-10.
Sunderland would be the next North East club to play for the Charity Shield, doing so in both 1936 and 1937. Newcastle have featured in five more matches since then – most recently in 1996, when Alan Shearer made his debut for the club – but they have never managed to repeat their debut success. Their most recent Charity Shield goals came as long ago as the 1952 match. They were scored by Vic Keeble, a bustling centre-forward who had only recently signed for the club, doing so on the recommendation of scout – and 1909 winner – Bill McCracken.
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